Seapine Moves to Cover Testing Life Cycle - Software Development Times On The Web

Seapine Moves to Cover Testing Life Cycle
Acquisition of QA Wizard rounds out QA, issue-tracking tool suite
By Christina M. Purpi

July 1, 2002 — Privately held Seapine Software Inc. has acquired start-up QA Wizard Inc. and has released its tools as part of the Seapine product suite.

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but Seapine (www.seapine.com) president Richard Riccetti explained it was a stock deal, with QA Wizard becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Seapine.

"The reason we chose QA Wizard was because they had an almost fully developed product," said Riccetti. "When demonstrated, [its products] were technically ahead of market leaders such as Mercury Interactive, Empirix, Segue and RadView," he claimed.

The acquired company's products, QA Wizard and Load Wizard, will become part of the Seapine Development Suite. The suite also includes Seapine's own Surround SCM and TestTrack Pro 4.7, which adds the new TestTrack Pro SDK. The SDK enables developers to integrate TestTrack with help-desk and CRM solutions to manage more of the development process.

"Our goal was to expand our focus to manage the whole software development life cycle: every point along the development process, the testing process and through deployment," said Riccetti.

Riccetti explained that QA Wizard is an automated testing application, comparable to Mercury Interactive's and Empirix's products. "It can script very quickly because the engine doesn't require programming. You can go back and edit the scripts, which saves time because you're producing less scripts."

Load Wizard is a performance load-testing tool that simulates thousands of users simultaneously running against a Web site, which evaluates response time and reliability, Riccetti said.

Surround SCM is a client/server, cross-platform SCM tool that integrates tightly with TestTrack Pro, allowing for change management by tracking the historical information behind the change, explained Riccetti. "It's a snap-in replacement for [Microsoft's] Visual Source Safe, a product line that's notoriously slow, buggy and does not support remote access." Surround SCM includes GUI support on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows and is scheduled to be released into beta this month.

"What differentiates us from all competitors but Rational, is that we're offering full management of the SCM life cycle," claimed Riccetti. "There are few that offer a suite of integrated tools that allow you to take requirements, turn them into products, create test plans, then turn them into test cases which are executed."

QA Wizard is available now and costs $4,995 per license. Load Wizard will not be available until September. Pricing has not yet been released for Surround SCM and Load Wizard.

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